The Time-travelling Botanist

Recently, whilst browsing through a box file of family history notes, I came across something which I thought had been lost forever, either to a house clearance, various down-sizings or maybe just one move too many. The fact that I had, over the years, occasionally asked family members about it, clearly showed I had absolutely no idea whatsoever as to its location.

Please do not worry, it is not some precious heirloom, well, not to the world at large, just to me.

So, Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you an old school project from when NaHaL wasn't so naturally high (tall). A snapshot of the wild (I hope) flora around me in the north east of England when I was a child.

Back then, home was an old station house alongside a disused railway, the passengers and freight a distant memory, the infrastructure dismantled and even the track bed recycled for its stone. This left behind a barren substrate of polluted material courtesy of more than a hundred years of coal and diesel-powered locomotives, which as it turned out was a positive as well as a negative. Having little in the way of nutrients, the ground was not easily colonised by vigorously-growing plants like grasses, nettles and docks, which allowed many native wildflowers to gain an initial foothold. Obviously, I didn't appreciate the subtleties of the ecology at the time, but taken together with the half mile walk between mature hedges and verges along the lane to the nearest village, this was my world. Surely everywhere was the same as this?

By the early 1970s, my bit of County Durham was similar to the wider area, in coming to terms with the decline in heavy industry. Locally, this wasn't steel making or ship building, but in coal and clay mining and brick and pipe manufacture, as well as the eyesores of spoil heaps and disused industrial infrastructure. In hindsight, I guess the re-colonisation of these sites by Nature was something of a blessing, as agricultural intensification was now laying waste to unimproved meadows and hedges with the latter grubbed out to make way for larger fields and the land being drenched in all manner of agro-chemicals.

But in the final year of Junior School, I was blithely unaware of all this, and blissfully exploring the natural world around me. I didn't venture far, I didn't need to.

The 21st Century me can't guarantee the identification of these plants, as I suspect that at the time my mum helped a bit. And she may well have passed on to me her colloquial names for things, rather than anything the botanical community would use.

There are a few questions hanging in the air, though:

• What has happened to the Lesser Celandine? We should be told;
• Hmmm, Goldilocks? That looks a bit buttercup-like to me;
• The obviously missing caption should be, I think, Orange Hawkweed. Which is odd because, as seems likely, my lifelong love of Orange Hawkweed must date from this time. And nowadays I call it Fox and Cubs;
• There are a few obvious omissions, if memory serves, but that might be due to an earlier or later flowering period. For example, Great Mullein which probably only begins flowering in Summer. Plus, it would be a right pain trying to press a six foot high plant and fit it into a seven inch square notebook;
• So, Stinging Nettle but not one species of thistle?! Young NaHaL was obviously even more of a wimp than his older self;
• Was this the last time anyone, including me, could read my hand-writing?

I shall leave you with a link to the Disused Stations website, which contains a potted history of the railway station near Hunwick. Only one image here pertains to the time I lived there, the one from June 1968, presumably taken when I was at school in the village and not photo-bombing out of a window 😊